life has on the quality of his music, or on the albums, or on Queen or on their concerts. In many ways, although an understanding of the private Freddie is necessary to appreciate his genius, it is the public Freddie who is the representation of that genius and his private life should remain so.

We do not need an understanding of his past, his way of life, or his problems to understand his songs. We do not need to know who this piece of music was written about or what he is saying about himself in this other piece to appreciate the music. All we need is to listen to the lyrics, to feel the music and to bathe in the power of his voice and his genius and we understand and know all we need to about Freddie Mercury and his Genius.

To Be Continued....

Romantic

Freddie classed himself as a hopeless romantic. His songs are balladic in form on the whole (with notable exceptions). Yet both terms have become, like many others, watered down to a stage where they are nothing like their original meanings. The English language, of which Freddie was a master in his use of imagery and meaning, has been bastardised by successions of fools. Mass media has created mass ignorance and the beauty of the language has been replaced with a misused mismatched concoction of harsh syllables with no meaning. Terrific! (From, of course, the adjectival form of 'terrify'.) We use terms such as 'beautiful' to mean 'pretty'; 'tragedy' to mean 'tragic' or, even worse, 'sad'; 'hero' to mean anyone who is in the paper for no reason. Recently, in Australia, people who carried the Commonwealth Games Baton were 'heroes', as were two people trapped in a mine collapse, but interestingly, not the people who saved them. The Hero is covered elsewhere in these works, but the language and the dissolution of English is not and it is two words in particular that concern us here.